Chapter 4 - The Facts Of Hair

Throughout the ages, brightly colored hair has inspired the passionate lovers and great poets: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton.

Artists of such monumental stature as Botticelli, Titian, and da Vinci could have made fortunes as hairdressers. In fact, some of their most breathtakingly beautiful creations are still being copied today.

More practically, hair protected Cro-Magnon man from the elements—and still serves to maintain the normal temperature of the brain.

The early Greeks and Romans even found religious significance in hair. They believed life did not finally depart the body until Iris had descended from Olympus to cut a lock from the victim's tresses.

Today, businesses like Toni, Breck and Helene Curtis, salon chains like Maison Antoine and Coiffures Americana, and countless hairdressers earn billions of dollars, collectively, on the human head.

Psychiatrists, as is their wont, have attributed all sorts of symbolic meaning to hair . . . Well, we do tug at it when we're nervous. Samson believed his strength was in his long hair. And biologists are now of the opinion that the presence or absence of hair is a sex-linked trait.

Baldness, it is believed, is inherited; at least, the tendency to baldness. A man has only to study his family album to get some idea of what he'll look like pate-wise, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now. Some forty-three per cent of men and more than eight per cent of women are currently affected by baldness.

Scientists tell us hair is as strong as aluminum, can hold one third its weight in absorbed moisture and can be stretched to one and a half times its length, when wet.

If all the hair on your head were woven into a rope it would support a suspended weight of 2,000 pounds.

The anthropologist uses hair much as a detective would. To him, one strand of hair is the "safest" guide he knows to its owner's racial origin. While it is possible to curl or wave hair and even straighten hair, it is impossible to change its shape as it emerges from the follicle.

• Wavy and curly or smooth and silky, oval in cross-section, and fair, black, brown, red or tawny hair—these are all characteristic of the European.  Darker hair is found in the South; lighter hair in all shades is more typical of the North.
• Straight,   lank,   long  and   coarse,   round   in   cross-section, with a definite medulla or pith, and black in color—these are characteristic of the Chinese, Mongolian, and American Indian.
• Short, crisp and woolly, elliptical or kidney-shaped in cross-section, with no distinct medulla, and jet black, is hair characteristic of the dark-skinned races, except for the Australian and Indian aborigines.

Straight hair, then, is round in cross-section; wavy, is oval; and kinky, flat or elliptical. There are no red-haired races. Redheads, by the way, have a longer bleeding time than brunettes or blondes, which is why doctors make special preparations for carrot tops in childbirth.

Wavy hair is the shortest, and varies most in color. Straight hair is the longest. Anthropologically, wavy hair is generally considered the bridge between the lank and woolly types.

The hair on your head, as opposed to the half million hairs scattered all over your body, grows three-eighths to three-fourths of an inch a month. It grows faster in summer than winter, and faster by day than by night.

There is also a relationship between the color of your hair and the number of hair shafts on your head. Redheads, with the coarsest hair, usually have 80,000, brunettes 100,000 to 120,000, and blondes, with the finest hair, 140,000. Doctors will tell you that your hair, like your skin, reflects your physical condition. It is therefore a good barometer of your general health.

Embryologists point out that hair evolves from the same type of tissue as nerves. Actually hair functions as part of the nervous system by helping to transmit tactile sensations from the outer world. Hair then is an important sentry of the skin.

When you are cold or frightened, the nerves at the roots of each hair follicle send messages to the tiny muscles attached to these follicles, and they contract. The result is a mild prickly sensation. Hence the expression, "His hair stood on end."

The Anatomy Of A Hair

Each hair shaft grows from a tiny invagination in the skin, a follicle. At the bottom of each hair well is a small bulb of tissue containing tiny blood capillaries. As each new hair cell is formed on top of the papilla, it pushes new ones up the follicle. These new cells then are keratin-ized and the result is the hair you see on your head.

Keratin is also found in the nails of your fingers. And because neither your nails nor your hair are composed of living cells they are considered "dead," which is why you can cut both hair and nails and feel no pain.

Why do some people have curly hair as babies but not as adults? With growth, the scalp expands and the shape of the follicle is sometimes changed. Illness may also cause the scalp to expand and contract.

Sebaceous glands open into each follicle. These lubricate each shaft and, when well distributed, give it a healthy sheen. Brushing not only distributes natural oils along the length of each hair but brings essential nutrients to each strand of growing hair.

It takes thirty-five days to grow a single strand of hair, which has a life span of two to five years, after which the follicle which produced it takes a nap and the hair falls out. More than one hair may be formed in each follicle. When the follicle wakes up it forms a new hair. Some eighty hairs fall out a day. About ten per cent of all follicles on a normal head of hair are resting at all times.

The Hair Shaft

To the naked eye, well-brushed hair looks silken smooth. Actually, each shaft has a rough protective bark, not unlike the shingles of a roof. In cross-section, in fact, a hair resembles a tree or a carrot.

First, there is the interlocking protective membrane, the cuticle, which is in three layers. Then there is the medulla with its keratin, air spaces, fat granules and pigment; and, finally, the cortex with longitudinal fibers which give hair its elasticity, more pigment and more air spaces. Two types of pigment are found in the hair: melanin, which is brown, and a red pigment containing iron. Melanin is also present in the skin. Heredity and the combination of these two pigments determine the color of your hair.

When hair is healthy, the shingles of each shaft are closed and form a smooth surface. But when the hair shaft has absorbed too much color, permanent-wave lotion or shampoo, the shingles open up and the hair is rough. Damaged hair is really like chapped skin.

But while the cuticle is easily degraded by alkali and other strong chemicals, it is really much more resistant to invasion than the cortex. Treatment which dissolves the cortex only partially disintegrates the tougher cuticle.

Thus, when hair is overexposed to artificial color or wave, the inner layer, which is responsible for body and elasticity, is destroyed first. When it loses its texture and elasticity, it grows brittle, matted and split, overpor-ous and gummy, and loses its snap. In this state, it can be neither bleached nor waved.

What hair in this condition needs is instant hospitaliza-tion: hot oil conditioning, mild shampoos, and complete rest from hair treatments. Now is the time to buy a wig.

Some women have impossible hair some of the time, and others have impossible hair all the time. Some women would manage to look as if they had stepped out of the beauty parlor even if they were standing in the eye of a cyclone. Others look as if they've just stepped out of the beauty parlor only when they've just stepped out of the beauty parlor. Two hours later their hairdos have sunk without even a whimper, like a bride's first souffle1.

Hair, today, really is a fashion fabric. Some people have silk, some denim, and some mohair. Read the following chapters for the answer to your nagging hair problems.

Are You Ready To Move Onto The Next Lesson? Click Here...